Tech-Based Rural Development, Immigrant Investors, and the New Crossroads of Global Inequalities

This paper examines the cases of two failed technology-based rural businesses funded in part by immigrant investors through the EB5 visa program. The cases illustrate how multiple global-scale networks of power and authority... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the cases of two failed technology-based rural businesses funded in part by immigrant investors through the EB5 visa program. The cases illustrate how multiple global-scale networks of power and authority push and pull on the lives of small communities and their citizens. We argue that both cases evince a distinct role that “slow” investment capital plays in the propagation of precarious development projects. Further, the paper engages with the literatures of science and technology studies and world systems theory to orient our readers to contemporary mechanisms of inequality manifest in our cases. More specifically, we illuminate new ways in which neoliberal development ideologies shape global place hierarchy through the commodification of citizenship and discourses of centrality, peripheries, and poverty.